


Fate of the Relic

by NorroenDyrd



Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Elder Scrolls Online
Genre: Angst, Betnikh, Daedra Worship, Daggerfall, Daggerfall Covenant, Dark Magic, Dark Past, Elder Scrolls Lore, Emotional Baggage, Father-Daughter Relationship, Flashbacks, Gen, Necromancy, Past Character Death, Siege of Kvatch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-04
Updated: 2018-02-04
Packaged: 2019-03-13 16:07:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13574091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NorroenDyrd/pseuds/NorroenDyrd
Summary: In a desperate attempt to save his daughter during the Daedric invasion of Kvatch, a Breton mage from the Third Era tries to travel back in time, but finds himself too far in the past, in the age of an attempt at the dread Planemeld at the hands of Molag Bal, and gets entangled in making important decisions that put the fate of the entire Daggerfall Covenant at stake.





	Fate of the Relic

The relic hovers in mid-air above a cracked, moss-covered well that, in the times of the ancient Ayleids - Wild Elves as the locals call them - must have contained a glimmering, vivid-blue spring of magicka. Such wells are... will be... still common in Cyrodiil, eight hundred years since.  
  
Shaped rather like an hourglass, with rusty spikes adorning its metal frame, this floating object is rather small in size, around the length of a loaf of bread. But its modest dimensions are deceptive: contained within it, is the power to rouse the spirits of the dead, turning their raw, primal anger at being ripped from Aetherius into a controllable force that would make the wielder an unstoppable general at the head of an army of translucent spectral soldiers, whose burning, blank blue eyes never close to sleep, and who, even when struck down by the most crushing weapon, will reassemble themselves after a while from a sticky, gel-like blob of ectoplasm. Oh, and one must not forget about the skeletons: the relic is also more than capable of conjuring threads of cold, ghostly flame to stitch together dug-up bones, and pull them from their desecrated graves, with only one semi-sentient thought retained at the back of their yellowish, dusty skulls. Must. Destroy.  
  
Gideon has witnessed all of this firsthand.   
  
He has sensed the surge of the relic's magic, bitter and heavy and chilling to the bone like the coldest winter wind, as it washed, tide-like, over these peaceful shores, rekindling the blaze of a bygone war between his people, the Bretons, and the tribe of Orcish hunters and fishermen that has currently claimed this snatch of verdant land in the middle of the frothing sea.  
  
He has seen the soil ripple like boiling water, spewing out the shambling carcasses of Breton warriors that the tribe's ancestors had buried respectively once the war was over... Or, well, thought they had buried them respectively, not counting on them rising up again, and clicking their loosened, rotting teeth, with rivers of age-old soil streaming out of their gaping maws like dry vomit.  
  
He has heard the creaks and chatter of the walking bones that would resound through the milky mist, which perpetually shrouds the island's wartime graveyard. And the deafening wails of the enraged wraiths that would spill in a pulsing, shimmering blue and purple torrent out of the Ayleid ruins' white stone carcasses. And the strained rasps of the last breath that would be let out by the wounded, weakly twitching Orcs as they lay on the ground, with blood caking into strips of dark crust across their upturned faces, and their fading gazes fixed in blank terror at the undead monstrosities that had felled them - nothing like the feral forest beasts and enemy fighters of flesh and blood that they were used to tackling.  
  
All of this has been caused by a cult of necromancers - the ones who first uncovered the relic and powered it up with the soul essence of freshly slain Orcs and bound spirits alive. If left unchecked, the corruption unleashed by the ominously chanting robed figures would have spread far beyond the island, across the entire Iliac Bay, and into the heart of mainland High Rock. But, as fate would have it, a crew of pirates... pardon, the Redguard King's privateers... just happened to throw anchor near the island just in time to turn the tide of the Orcs' resistance against the cultists. And he, Gideon, a Breton sorcerer who would much rather be reading a book and enjoying a steaming cup of soothing Khajiiti mint chai in some place far warmer and far more library-like than the heart of an abandoned and overgrown Ayleid city (but well, you can't have everything), just happened to be tagging along with the said privateer crew. And also just happened to be the one to strike down the cultists' leader - by chasing after him into a pocket spirit realm, and making crystalline spikes shoot out of the ground (or what served as it outside the mortal world) to cage in the cultist's spirit likeness, and then commanding a summoned clannfear to enter that cage in an overpowering pounce, while he himself finished off the spitting, cursing shade with a lightning blast.  
  
And now that he has emerged, he just happens to be the one that the crew wants to decide the relic's fate. Should he banish it back into the world of spirits, where it will eventually dissolve in the currents of oblivion, never to disrupt the natural order of life and death again? Or should he lift it from its resting place and carry it off, presenting it as a gift to the leaders of the Daggerfall Covenant - an uneasy alliance between the races of Bretons, Redguards and Orcs, brought together by the need to defend themselves against the other nations of Tamriel as the Empire lies in ruins and everyone is at each other's throat. An artifact like this would certainly give the Covenant an edge in this endless strife... Perhaps even bring the war to a premature conclusion, as the other sides will be driven to negotiate by fear of an undead army. But... But... By the gods, he should not be the one making this choice! He should not even be here!  
  
It's not like Gideon has never made weighted decisions before. The responsibilities of leadership are not new to him: he is a high-ranking member of the Mages' Guild, respected enough to be allowed to lecture at the Arcane University, and an advisor at the court of the Count of Kvatch... Or rather, he will be. That is the whole problem. He will be. Eight hundred years from now.  
  
He does not belong to this age; born in the Third Age, he was... misplaced here by a ritual gone horribly wrong.   
  
Initially, he tried his utmost not to get involved in anything, lest an accidental blunder of his cause mass upheaval of the entire future of Nirn. His plan was to avoid talking to people, or being noticed by them at all, for that matter; to keep from as much as stepping on a blade of grass too forcefully. Because you never know what might happen: you squash a tiny inconspicuous bug, and then suddenly, centuries ahead, Tamriel ends up ruled by a madman that makes Emperor Pelagius look like the most boringly rational account-keeper in existence.  
  
But a plan like that is so very, very hard to follow, when you have landed, with no visible means of ever getting back, at a point in history when Molag Bal, the dread Daedric prince of domination, is trying to merge Nirn with his desolate plane of Colharbour, which is nothing but jagged cliffs and icy winds and packs of ravenous Dremora; while the mortal kinds and queens are too preoccupied by their infighting to even notice the greater threat. At a time like this, there are people in need of help at every turn - and given that he still has nightmares of the last time he thought of no-one else but himself... Well... Here he is.  
  
First, he could not refuse doing a favour for the privateers who saved him from drowning in the sea. Then, he got caught up in protecting the island Orcs. And now, he finds himself making a call that it is not his place to make.  
  
To make things worse, if he attempts to recreate the proper sequence of this period’s events and thinks back to what he learned from books - and that is not a lot; he is a sorcerer, not a historian - the accounts of the Alliance War are riddled with contradictions. The archivists representing the Daggerfall Covenant's opponents in the conflict, the Ebonheart Pact and the Aldmeri Dominion, do tell stories of the 'witching Bretons' raising the dead en masse to fight for them, while the Covenant scholars have never made any mentions of a necromantic artifact - not that Gideon remembers anyway.   
  
Could the other side be exaggerating? Have the Covenant writers been ordered to erase part of history out of shame? Did the Breton mages find some other way to gather an undead force, without the relic? Did his meddling create some manner of parallel timeline? Damn it all, this is giving him a headache!  
  
Swallowing a hard lump that burns his throat like he is falling ill, Gideon turns away from the relic to look over the crew members that have gathered on the opposite end of the Ayleid well chamber, close to the mouth of the crumbling tunnel that they came through. Watching. Waiting for him to decide.  
  
Curiously enough, they seem to have unconsciously flocked into two little groups, by the side of either one of the enormous sconces bearing two luminescent azure Welkynd crystals. Each of them has gravitated towards those who share the same opinion on the relic.  
  
On one side, standing tall and resolute, with her callused hands resting on her broad hips and her bushy eyebrows knitted into a caterpillar-like line that has almost entirely obscured her eyes, is First Mate Lambur. Though a servant of the Covenant, this Orcish seafarer is loyal to her people, first and foremost. And she cannot forgive the wielders of the relic for spilling the blood of her kin; nor can she believe that the Bretons and the Redguards will refrain from turning its power against her people in the future, when the Covenant is no longer needed.  
  
And Gideon cannot fault her for that: her race has suffered much at the hands of his, and so it will continue in the eras to come.  
  
The crew's onboard scholar, Neramo the High Elf, can also be seen next to Lambur, his lanky robed figure appearing as a greenish blur - like... an underwater stalk of seaweed - in the light of the Welkynd crystals. Gideon cannot make out Neramo’s features in detail from this distance - dear gods, he really does miss his eyeglasses; he wonders if any contraption of the sort has yet been invented, or at least discovered in Dwemer ruins - but he can easily imagine the elf's amber-yellow eyes glinting hungrily when they fall on the relic.   
  
Neramo yearns to study the Ayleid artifact - but at the same time, he is aware that the others would use it for war, for taking lives and subjugating the spirits of those already gone, rather than satisfying a voracious drive for knowledge that Gideon himself is no stranger to. Just as he is no stranger to what happens when a purely theoretical interest stops being all so pure.  
  
Overshadowed by the elf's and the Orc's tall frame, is a short, portly, fuzzy-bellied old Khajiit with glinting earrings in his rounded ears. He modestly describes himself as a humble sailor who loves nothing more than dozing in the sun - but, as the others reverently address him as Master Kasan, Gideon strongly suspects that he is the very same Kasan Five-Claw, Terror of the Seas, whose daring pirate adventures used to fascinate his... his little daughter so much when she was at the age of bedtime stories.  
  
The old cat is a free spirit, child of the roaring, untamed sea; and he believes that ancient magic, just like the rising tide, should not have any master. The source of such magic is better off banished than thrust between the clumsy, slippery fingers of those who cannot control it.  
  
Even that weasel Jakarn has joined Lambur's side of the argument. Gideon can see him reclining against a stone slab, legs crossed leisurely, fingers playing with the many brown and dark-red leather straps that make up his needlessly elaborate armour - but as their gazes meet, Gideon realizes (without even having to squint shortsightedly at the boy's face) that he is hiding tension beneath his nonchalant exterior. That he is... afraid of what his older kinsman might do with the relic.  
  
Or at least, that is how Gideon prefers to interpret it. It would have been... Not at all unpleasant to see Jakarn afraid.  
  
Gideon cannot deny that he has no fondness for the little thief. There is hardly anything about him that he does not find absolutely grating. Hardly anything at all. From his constant smugness and insistence on playing the role of a devious yet charming rogue, straight out of some third-rate adventure novel, of the sort that, when the time of fairytales passed, Gideon and his dear girl... so intelligent, so accomplished for a teenager, making her father so very proud... would pull apart into hilariously corny quotes about anatomically impossible sword fights and incredibly dense guards and irrevocably destroyed female bodices, laughing well into the small hours till the inside of their chests grew sore... Ahem. Well.   
  
Like Gideon said: Jakarn is annoying to the core. From his smugness and theatrically deliberate roguishness to the way he tends to beguile and seduce people into helping him - men, women, those of any other gender, it does not matter, so long as they find him attractive - and then, once he has pulled off whatever con he has been working on, eel out of their grasp, conveniently forgetting all about the flowery promises he may have made. Like this elven girl, Irien: the little braggart fed her some tall tale about being a prince in disguise, ready to whisk her off into his glittering kingdom. And he would have gotten away with it, too, sailing into the sunset with the rest of the pirates and leaving her to her broken heart  - but Irien proved too strong-willed to be cast aside so easily. She has come aboard with the rest of the crew, unafraid of the hard work that one gets burdened with if one has no money to pay for passage, and with her mind stubbornly set on disciplining Jakarn out of his lying and thieving ways.  
  
The little slug has been avoiding her ever since, refusing to take her seriously - just as Irien herself has been refusing to listen to well-meaning friends who have been trying to explain to her that it is not a woman's job to fix a man, and that she deserves better than Jakarn. These friends have mostly included Lambur and other female sailors - but Gideon, as someone who... has... once had... experience of being the father of a young daughter... would also pitch in politely on occasion. Something that amused Jakarn to no end when he found out.  
  
'Giving Irien friendly advice, eh, old man?' he would say, strutting up to Gideon and leaning against the board with an elaborate pelvic thrust that drew a collective dreamy sigh from a group of sailors.  
  
'Trying to compete with her favourite thief, who is suave and young and handsome and did I mention young?'  
  
And there it is. Yet another reason to dislike Jakarn. The thief is very, very fond of reminding Gideon of their age difference. Utterly discourteous - and shall he say... juvenile?  
  
But now, Jakarn appears to have set their little rivalry aside, and is anxiously tracking Gideon's every move, perhaps even praying to whatever god pays heed to the likes of him that the 'old man' not close his fingers round the artifact and take it with him away from the well. Like Lambur and the others, Jakarn loathes the thought of the relic causing any more destruction. The matter is so grave that even the shameless scoundrel has grown a conscience.   
  
The second Welkynd crystal has turned into a rallying point for those crew members who are not ready to part with the power of the ancients. Their group is headed by Kaleen, captain of the privateering vessel - a lithe Redguard woman whose every muscle is now terse as a bowstring before a decisive shot. She has pressed her arms close to her sides, fists balled, and inclined her head a little way forward, as a feline hunter would in preparation for a pounce: indeed, the mass of her springy dreadlocks, which she has combed back and tied with a broad ribbon, resembles a senche's mane.   
  
An admirable woman, Captain Kaleen. Fearless. Capable. Great at fishing confused, spluttering time travellers out of the deep dark sea. Even though he has already repaid for his life by nigh on joining her crew, Gideon still believes that he owes the captain. And that is... disconcerting, somehow.  
  
Devoted to the Covenant and the Redguard king Faha'rajad almost to the point of blind zealotry, Kaleen is prepared to pay any price to ensure her liege's victory in the Alliance War. Even if that means resorting to dark magic. Which is an uncommon belief for a Redguard: the people of Hammerfell are so prejudiced against magical summoning and other spells, seen as 'perversion of nature', that, in his lifetime back... home in the Third Era, Gideon did not meet more than a handful of Redguards bold enough to delve into the arcane. There was... will be Trayvond, and Borissean, and maybe a couple of others. All exiles, forced to leave home and study in Cyrodiil, just to get away from superstitious kinsfolk. And even they would not touch necromancy with a ten-foot pole.   
  
To think that Kaleen would stray so far from the rigid ethics of her people, for whom there is nothing more blasphemous than turning the dead into your slaves... It sends a chill down Gideon's spine. When one tosses aside the morals that one grew up with, one is dangerously close to veering away from the light. He knows. He has lived this.  
  
Crafty Lerisa, Kaleen's fellow seafarer and the famed mistress of disguise (Gideon is still trying to puzzle out how she once managed to trick him into thinking that she was a fern), is hovering impatiently a few paces away, tapping her black-booted foot against the floor, while her pet monkey Howler is paddling around her on all fours in restless circles, pushing himself forward with the knuckles of his furry little paws. His mistress, no doubt, thinks of the Ayleid relic as a key to fame and fortune... And she could use some fortune, as her own ship was lured out onto a sharp cliffs by a rival pirate, where it (or, well, she, if Gideon is to be respectful) perished amid the merciless waves. Losing a ship, he imagines, must have felt to Lerisa like losing a person... Someone really dear to her.  
  
And that brings Gideon to the last member of the crew. One who, perhaps, wants the Covenant to use the relic even more than Kaleen does. Nicolene.   
  
Oh, Nicolene. The eager young Nicolene. Once a small-time pickpocket, struggling to get by with her brothers away at the war, and now, after she unexpectedly impressed Kaleen by cutting a purse full of gold coins off her belt, the captain's faithful cabin girl. And also her most ardent fan, with one of the most heartwarming youthful crushes that Gideon has ever seen blossom, ever since his...   
  
He does keep digressing in that direction, doesn't he? Every now and then, no matter how hard he struggles to focus, his thoughts inevitably stray to his daughter. His beautiful little Felicienne. The only family he had, for many, many years. The one who was taken from him, so abruptly, so unfairly; the one for whose sake he attempted this failure of a ritual that has left him stranded in the past.  
  
While he freezes up, a sharp pain slithering from the pit of his stomach up towards his heart, Nicolene leaves her captain's side, and edges closer to the well. Her pretty heart-shaped face, framed by carelessly cut blonde hair, is set into a steely-hard look that is strikingly unfamiliar to Gideon (whose memories of the little cabin girl mostly revolve around her gushing over Kaleen's unrivalled wit or fantastical skill with the blade or unbending pride, so flushed and sparkly-eyed and obviously in love).  
  
'I have brothers in the Covenant army,' she says through gritted teeth. 'If the war does not end soon, they might die'.  
  
Her blue eyes light up with a scorching flash, her jaw squares, and a shadow brews over her countenance. A shadow that Gideon has so often seen in the mirror.  
  
The Daedra burst into his beloved Kvatch, in the distant year 433 of the Third Era, without warning, swift and unstoppable and indiscriminatingly cruel like a natural disaster. Before a single night ran its course, his life was thrown into shambles.   
  
One moment, his Felicienne was alive, his one delight, his pride and joy, an aspiring warrior and armoursmith, dividing her days between art classes (to some day embody her elaborate designs into intricate metal and leatherwork) and martial training sessions under the tutelage of Gideon's good friend Savlian Marius (to some day compete in the Kvatch Arena, provided that Gideon brewed up a potent enough healing formula to keep himself from having a heart attack). And the next, she was naught but a limp, unnaturally silent, blood-soaked rag doll, sprawled across the floor of their burning home, with a patch of blood-tinged sky and the stark black silhouette of the city cathedral visible through the gap in the charred roof over her head, and sizzling fallen embers glowing in her hair like fireflies, and her stiff, cold little fingers still clasped round the hilt of the sword she had grabbed on her way out of bed and thrust through a gap in the gnarled, spiky red and ruby armour of the Dremora that lay by her side. Slain before it could get to Gideon - but not before it sliced at this worthless old man's defender with a massive barbed blade of its own.  
  
Felicienne's mother had been taken from him many years prior - eaten away by an illness that, as they only found out after she was gone, had been the result of a curse, put on her by her own Sheogorath-touched mother, incensed by the fact that her daughter had 'defiled herself' by birthing a child with no talent for magic. Back then, there had been nothing Gideon could do, except watch with a dark joy in his eyes when the curse backfired and his mother-in-law succumbed to it herself. After that, his wife's ghost had visited him and told him she was finally at peace - and, with time, he had come to terms with her being gone. But Felicienne... Her death was the one blow he could not handle. The one wound he could not recover from.  
  
If only he could turn back time, he told himself, clutching his daughter's body to his chest and staring blankly at the spire of the grand temple that Kvatch's people had dedicated to Akatosh, the all-mighty dragon god, master of time's unending flow. If only he could devise a spell that might bring him back to the point before the Daedra ravished his city and killed his child. And maybe, just maybe, once he perfected the spell enough, he could travel back even further, and stay his mother-in-law's hand in the middle of preparing to cast her curse.  
  
The thought possessed him, burned its path through the crevices of his brain like the legions of Dremora burned their path through the streets of Kvatch. And like Kaleen, like Nicolene, he was ready to use any means at his disposal to make his insane idea work. If that meant achieving what he wanted. If that meant hearing his daughter's voice again.  
  
And somewhere along the way, in the middle of a never-ending chain of sleepless nights, when his coffee-fuelled body reached the verge of collapsing, and his swollen head felt like somebody was driving sharpened pegs through his temples, and his pounding ears did not hear his own tearful prayers to the time god, all fruitless, all unanswered, morals stopped mattering. His oath to steer clear of Daedra (which he had once taken, disgusted and horrified by his mother-in-law's actions) stopped mattering.   
  
And there came the flicks of a knife over his flesh, carving glyphs and incantations in Daedric lettering (he still has the curving scars trailing all the way from his shoulders to his wrists), dripping his own blood into a summoning circle, while his own shadow danced on the wall in the pale blue light of the weeping, half-melted candles, rippling in a noiseless cackle. There came hoarse, feverish chanting, much like the one that accompanied the cultists' ritual on this island; and hoarse, screaming pleas for someone, something to hear him, to grant him the power that Akatosh refused to yield.  
  
He did not care that the first Daedra Lord to respond to his desperate summons, the first to manifest in his circle of candles in the form of a floating, bestial horned mask, was Molag Bal, the one whom the Dark Elves call one of the Four Corners of the House of Troubles. He did not care that, in return for a spell that would bring him back to the time of the Daedric invasion, the Prince of Domination asked, in his rumbling, growling voice, that Gideon slay an entire community of Daedra worshippers, who were doing their rites on the slopes of the Valus mountains, and needed to be exterminated for the sole crime of venerating Molag Bal's rival, Boethiah. He did not care for the searing white blaze of magic that poured from his own fingertips, engulfing one staggering, shock-struck robed man and woman after the other. He did not care for their cries of pain, and for how their eyes went glassy and wisps of smoke curled out of their mouths. He did not care. Until it was too late. Until he realized that Molag Bal had tricked him, transporting him to the start not of Mehrunes Dragon's assault on Tamriel but his own. Until he got himself entangled in a rapidly unravelling string of events that have brought him this far. Into an Ayleid ruin, where he is standing face to face with a young woman in those eyes he sees the same tempest that racked through his body when he called to Felicienne but was met only with the soulless howls of the wind scattering ash over the dying city.  
  
Gideon opens his mouth to speak to Nicolene, to tell her that he understands, that he wished for his daughter to be alive no less than she wishes for her brothers to return from the war... But nothing good came out of it.  
  
But hardly does he utter as much as a syllable, when his hand makes an involuntary twitching motion, and his fingertips brush against the relic's surface. The hourglass frame resonates with a charge of magic - powered up by the poignant, flame-like agony of Gideon's inner turmoil, and images of his lost child. For a moment, the chamber is flooded by blinding light; and when it fades, the relic is gone. Banished from the mortal plane before Gideon could even decide what to do with it.  
  
Nicolene's throat tightens, while the whites of her eyes swell up with bloodied pink, scathed both by the light and by her own unshed tears.  
  
Striding across the distance that remains between her and Gideon, she bites into her lips, nostrils flaring, stands on tiptoe - and gives him a ringing slap that almost fractures his cheekbone.  
  
'You doomed my brothers!' she screams, before running off to sob into Kaleen's chest. 'I will never sail with you again!'  
  
No graver insult could possibly come from the lips of a seafarer - and the crew realizes it, remaining perfectly silent even as Kaleen, apparently unused to being embraced, gives her cabin girl an awkward pat on the back and glares at Gideon past Nicolene's jerking shoulders, her face a mask.  
  
'I am sorry,' Gideon whispers, feeling that the smarting imprint of Nicolene's hand is not the only thing that has made his gaze so dim with tears.  
  
'I am so, so sorry. More than you will ever realize'.  
  
'Come,' Master Kazan purrs, now that the silence is broken, approaching Gideon from the other side and pleasing a padded, clawed hand on his back to support him. 'Let us get you outside. If Nicolene and the Captain do not sail with you, this one will. You made the right choice. Woe is the walker who allows love and loyalty to turn into something dark'.  
  
Gideon closes his eyes and draws a shallow breath.  
  
The old cat does not even know how right he is.


End file.
